What PR and Marketing Learned in the #TwitterIPO S-1 Filing

Yesterday, Twitter released more details about its internal operations in its SEC S-1 filing, which was finally made public. If reading through 164 pages of SEC filing statements isn’t your thing, we understand. They’re not exactly scintillating reading. Here are the high points that marketers and PR professionals should pay close attention to.

As we mentioned in our previous post on the topic, Twitter identified that its strongest areas of growth (and thus what it’s hiring for) are mobile and international, with 75% of monthly active users using the service from a mobile device. When you put Twitter’s growth of monthly active users next to Facebook’s, you see (as expected) Twitter’s growth rate increasing faster than Facebook’s:

What’s interesting is that if you compare the quarter over quarter changes, Twitter’s audience growth rate appears to be much more volatile as they rapidly iterate and expand into new markets:

Even more important, the pace at which Twitter is releasing new advertising products is increasing significantly:

So what should we expect as marketers and PR professionals moving forward? Marketers will appreciate the ability to do improved paid lead generation from Twitter via their newly enhanced Twitter Lead Generation Cards (click here to try ours). It would be no surprise at all to see a pay per conversion/pay per lead model roll out for their Twitter cards; right now you have to create a card and then create a promoted campaign separately. Expect to see this process streamlined. (and if you’d like us to do a guide on setting this up, retweet this blog post!)

Both marketers and PR folks will be paying close attention to an expanded rollout of the Amplify product, as it has the potential to greatly increase both the reach and conversion of earned and paid media. Amplify is in limited testing now, but permits marketers and communicators the ability to embed advertising into real-time video content such as online television. Imagine being able to immediately place links to more content, highlighting a specific executive’s Twitter handle, or a corporate brand as an earned media news story is being shown onscreen:

These and many more changes will likely roll out to marketers, advertisers, and PR folks as Twitter goes public, because each of them helps to drive all-important revenue. Stay tuned as we keep our eyes on what’s next at Twitter – and how you can take advantage of it.

Christopher S. Penn
Vice President, Marketing Technology

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